Of course poker is how you play your cards, but as I said before, some situations require you to go all in pre-flop (short stacked needing to double up) so it boils down to odds and luck after someone calls you - and for many people it seems (my hand history included) highly favored hands get busted out much too often (refer to my older posts for how much "too often" is...) from bad calls.

I have to agree I have had weird experiences on PS too. I am just so surprised that there are so many others that feel that PS could be rigged. I have been playing with them for more than a year and haven't really tried any other site. I have lost about 100$ or so with them. I win occasionally on play money but I have always lost under bad beat circumstances with real money. Now since I haven't compiled detailed hand histories I can't claim I have been scammed outright but the suspicion definitely exists.

One other thing I have noticed on PokerStars and I am not sure if others have is that when I am playing multiple tables, I have noticed that the my hole cards and the community cards are very similar across different tables especially if they are dealt around the same time(eg. I would have Ace-Small on two tables and the flop would be 9-9-Q on table one and 9-J-9 on another) . I have noticed this consistently since I joined PS to know that this wasn't just coincidence. I know that most random number generators are based on the system clock. Is this why this is happening? Anyone has better insight into how the different poker sites shuffle their decks?

Also, I want to say to the posters on this thread that keeps telling everyone not to complain. Most of us are here talking to each other trying to find answers. Now I can't be hundred percent certain if I am being had or if I am just playing worse with real money than with play money. Thats why we are all airing our thoughts on this forum to figure out whats happening. Isn't that the whole point of coming on to a forum?

true! dont let the "stu ungars" beat you down about posting anything... try though to keep all the hand histories you play! i can stress this enough. other than that free reighn baby. i think poker stars is full of shit... i have seen many times (as i play multiple tables) duplicate cards, as well as duplicate flops. i have recently been witness to (get this) all comunity cards were (as) (4s) (10h) (js) (jc) i was the only person that folded thier hand and heres how it played i was position 9 and the button. pos. 1 showed (3s
) (5s) a flush ace high pos. 2 showed (jh) (9h) three of kind jacks. pos 3 showed (7s) (9s) a flush ace high, higher kicker. pos four showed (4c) (4h) full house 4's and j's. pos. 5 showed (8s) (ks) a flush ace high. pos 6 showed (jd) (10d) a full house j's and 10's. pos. 7 mucked (later to say he also had a flush with (10s) (6s). pos 8 shows (ac) (ad) and won with a full house aces and jacks. ummm i left the table and logged out because i had the other two remaining spades and would also of had a flush, the (2s) (qs) making all 13 spades out the case jack on the river as well as two pocket pair hands that made trips. (now stu dont get your nickers in a twist) i am not saying that its rigged but wow was that a one in a biliion hand. and the best part was the pot was worth $1200. all showed but 7 who had it set to muck.

The pros play at much higher stakes than a regular player, and new players don't start of playing at $200 tournaments anyways, so the pros woudn't be familiar with this idea. Those who are new to the game have to have some sort of incentive to continue playing at the site. In the long run, bad players will lose money, but why are there so many still floating around Pokerstars? They get exceedingly lucky with a few hands, and decide they can continue to get lucky so they input more money to the site. Look how many active players there are active on an average day - 60000-80000 players? That's how they make business - attracting new players and pumping more rake.

As I said before, I made my first deposit to Pokerstars without a bonus code. Lo and behold, everything is normal again and I'm making money. Bad beats only occur as often as they usually occur as well as having a few of my own, and NOT every other hand with a 20:1 favorite. Before, my previous deposits had a bonus code where I was to gain a certiain amount of FPP's to get the bonus. It was bad beat after bad beat before, which would only try to make me deposit more money so I can reach my goal. Luckly, I had made enough on the site at the time to cover the loss, and after I reached the FPP goal, I was basically dead even again. It just seems too oddly coincidental.

We all established that you people suggest poker stars is the most rigged site ever. I have to agree I played over a month on that site and I lost over 2000 dollars. I play on ultimatebet and I win alout of cash tournaments but on poker stars thats impossible. Its just bad beat after bad beat. You just can't win when you think you have the best hand your always beat on pokerstars.

Risk: This site rakes in millions every day from its players. It is in their best interests to keep their players satisfied, otherwise they will move to another one of the hundreds of poker sites online. They serve hundreds of thousands of people. If it ever got out that they were rigging the deck in the favor of bad-beats, what do you think would happen? Everybody would leave the site, never to play there again.

Reward: By rewarding bad players and hurting solid players, what does this do? The solid players are their repeat-customers who generate a significant chunk of the daily rake. Oftentimes it is the bad players that deposit once and are over with. Why would it be in their best interests to rig the games *against* their repeat customers to keep the (oftentimes) 1-time customers there longer?

Nevertheless, let's play devil's advocate. Say you're right...say they're able to increase profits by, say, 10% by rigging the deck. Is this proper risk vs reward? Being completely destroyed when it comes out that they're rigging and losing millions upon millions in future revenue...versus adding only 10% to their already huge profits? C'mon...these guy's aren't stupid.

2.

For every time *you* get bad-beat and lose, someone else was bad-beating you and won. Poker is a zero-sum game (not including rake). For every loser there is a winner. The reason there are so many posts here about this topic is due to selection bias. Each of you has been biased to find threads that complain about poker being rigged and post in them because you have lost money. The winners have no reason to post here because they are not disgruntled. Only people who are losing money would complain in an open forum (meaning: winners would read this thread but not comment).

3.

Poker players take heavy swings in their bankrolls. After reading many of these threads, it sounds like most of you are 1) not practicing proper bankroll management to reduce risk of ruin and 2) are MTT players. MTT players tend to have very large swings. Here's a tip: the max buy-in for a MTT should be 2% of your bankroll.

4.

If these games were rigged, with so many players using Poker Tracker and similar software suites, don't you think it would have be statistically provable and all over the news by now? *YOU* are experiencing either short-term variance or are simply a poor player.

5.

PokerStars is known to be one of the "toughest" poker sites out there. UB, FTP, and others are much more fishy and loose. Had any of you considered that maybe *that's* why you lose there but win elsewhere?

6.

We always remember bad beats much more frequently than the wins. From Rounders:

Mike McDermott: "In "Confessions of a Winning Poker Player," Jack King said, "Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career." It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can't stop thinking about the way I lost it. "

One of the biggest online poker sites rigging the deck for little to no reason? I don't think so. Conspiricy theories from people who get bad beat, trying to justify losing their bankrolls? I'd believe that any day. No offense people but until someone conducts a statistical analysis on the card distribution methods of PStars, I would be hard-pressed to believe such a conspiracy theory. Stop making claims based on a few hand histories(and, hence, short-term variance and psychological bias) and start modeling the card distributor on PStars. Tell me what you come up with. It'll sure take you a while though...with 52! possible decks to model.

Good points, but there are a few things I've observed nonetheless after playing PS for a year.

1. Online high stakes wouldn't need to be rigged in the first place, since new players often do not start at $200 MTTs and whatnot. We'll focus on the lower stakes.

Beginners or bad players who are new to poker need incentive to continue playing. Naturally, luck may hit a few hands, but in the long run they'll lose out, and simply stop or go to another site. Players who are developping knowledge about the game (in a sense, better than new players) but have not yet built a bankroll will end up playing lower stakes, and will be with these newer players. In the long run, better players will win money from the bad players and move up the stakes, and the bad players will leave. Yes this is theoretical, but in the long run, it makes sense - if you're building a huge bankroll, why would you continue playing $1 games? If you're new to a game and in the long run you're getting outplayed by better players, are you going to pump money in the site again? At low stakes, bad palyers are given a chance by getting a few more luck shots on most hands so then they feel inclined to continue playing. The better players that get sucked out much to often blame their luck, and instead pump in more money so that they can continue to improve their skill and win back their losses. Now the site has all those players pumping in money. Repeat customers will move up the ladder, and then face harder players and would then eventually have to drop back down or drop out. There would be less and less players this way. A maximum of 50% of players (it's always less) will be winning on the site. How is the site still holding more and more players? Yes, some of the losing players may continue to play, but not all - but how would that make sense if the site is still growing with a higher number of losing players?

Keeping more players is much more profit than losing them from not being a winning player. The site needs to pump in players - it can't survive with the same players over and over again, who would eventually stop playing sometime or another.

2.

I'm actually a winning player, surprise surprise. Not much, but I play low stakes so not really much I can do there. Poker actually isn't zero-sum with a big site like Pokerstars. For every winner there are MULTIPLE losers. it isn't 50/50, only theoretically and if there was 0 entropy. Again I claim, with multiple losers, some of them will drop out of the site. How many players will that leave?

3.
Can only speak for myself here. I stick with $1-$3 SNG's and MTT's anyway.

4.
Ask how many new players keep statistics and hand histories right when they begin playing poker. I surely didn't when I started. I didn't even know about sharkscope or think about using statistical programs to record histories. That's why low stakes is an easy target. They take poker less serious on the whole. Serious players who play higher stakes would record hand histories - but as I said before, the site need not to rig that level anyways. I have seen few statistics where playters recorded right from the start. Playing many many games, the result was rigged, but the problem was there weren't enough people who had their proof to justify this argument. It's because not enough peopel bothered to record hands in teh first place.

5.
I only played PS..can't comment here.

6.
Again I can only speak for myself here. I remember just as well my bad beats as well as my suck outs. I record them down since remembering the times where I made a bad call but lucked out helps me away from going on tilt from being bad beat. I recorded, however, many many more suck outs than luck outs. But generally I do agree with this statement as the majority of people only remember bad beats.

In the end, no one really knows except for some of the site staff themselves. Yes they have claimed their random number generator, but how do YOU know for sure it's 100% legit? did you see the code yourself, every single bit of it? I'm not saying it's 100% rigged myself, but all I have is a suspicion and listning to other people's experiences.

Btw, it'snot a few hand histories, there's a lot. I didn't record the first part of my hand histories because I didn't know one could do that when I first started. Though lucky for me, after my 3rd deposit WITHOUT a bonus code, everything was fine and dandy. I'm winning now, and I didn't even change my gameplay at all. Maybe I just had 6 months of bad luck, and then suddenly 6 months of good luck, who knows? but I still believe that there is something at least fishy with the lower-stakes tables of PS. Remember, this isn't only happenign to me, I see other people getting bad beat by newer players. I pay attention to the way other people play and realize that sometimes I see a lot more bad beats in a table than I have with multiple games IRL.

A few of my friends and I have been playing PokerStars for about a year and a half, maybe two years. We are all decent players, but our worst beat stories always came from PokerStars. I remember one hand where I was dealt pocket Aces, I tripled the blinds when it got to me, had two or three callers. Flop comes out AKK. Check gets around to me and I bet about half the pot. Person to my left moves all in, everyone else folds. I sit for a little bit, then I call. She has 4-of-a-kind Kings. Obviously, that's not proof per say, but by this point I've certainly had my suspicions raised. Now, let me tell you what is proof.

A couple days ago my friend and I were at his house playing in a quick 3-table tourney, a freeroll. Well, on the first hand we were dealt pocket 9s. Not the best hand in a freeroll since everyone likes to move in on the first hand anyway. Well, somebody raised 200 to 220, he got a couple callers, we raised it 200 to 420, and everyone that had already called the initial bet called our raise. Flop comes out K 8 6 or something similar that didn't help us. By this point, we've already committed so many chips we decided just to shove and get it over with. As you can imagine, we lost. Some dude ended up making a set of 8s with 84 offsuit.

Big deal, it was a freeroll and we really didn't care. So how's that proof? Well, about 10 minutes later while we were playing some GameCube, his computer beeped twice like something was going on in the background. So we look at it and... PokerStars is open. Not only is PokerStars open, but we're in a tournament. What tournament? The SAME EXACT tournament that we were just knocked out of on the first hand. I kid you not. We were sitting with 1,440 in chips, everyone was sitting in the same seat, everyone that had been knocked out on that first hand was sitting there with a little less than the starting stack size. So we were obviously both creeped out of our skin and we tried chatting the people up on there to see what was going on. Nobody responded to us. We typed something along the lines of "Hello? I went all-in the very first hand of this tournament and got knocked out, so why am I sitting here with 1,440 in chips??" Nobody responds. So at this point the only thing left to do is to check our instant hand history. We open it up and there isn't even a record of the very first hand. In fact, there weren't even records of some of the hands that were played while we were sitting there trying to talk to these people.

So what exactly could have happened that caused PokerStars to put us back in this freeroll? A glitch in their system is all I can think of, but here's my best explanation of their "system". Anyone remember StarCraft at all? Remember playing against computers? Remember how the computers always knew where you were even if they hadn't scouted out that part of the map? Well, I think the same thing is going on at PokerStars. They have a bunch of bots that sit at the tables with real players. They know what hand you have and what hands each other has. Then, they simply play the odds. If they hold a drawing hand with x% to suck out and it's only x% of their stack to call, they'll go for it. If you're completely dominated on the flop and you try bluffing, they'll call no matter what. If you have them dominated on the flop, think 99% odds, and they know they're going to suck out runner runner, they'll call anything.

Think about it. There's no hard evidence of PokerStars cheating, aside from if we had been able to capture this glitch on video or something. All there are are bad beat stories and impossible odds. And people always say, "what does PokerStars have to gain by rigging it? If someone else wins, they get the money, not PokerStars." That may be true, but if PokerStars really uses bots like I've suggested, then they are getting that money. It's really a pretty damn good scam.

One thing's for sure. I'll never play that fucking rigged piece of shit ever again. In fact, after witnessing that glitch, I'll never play any online poker ever again. It could very well all be rigged. What's to stop every poker site from using bots for players? There's a lot of money to be made. I wish I had a video of the glitch occurring, but it's impossible to anticipate something like that happening. I hope those of you who are nay sayers can keep your mouths shut and let this rigged site be exposed for what it is.

Me and some friends (all good live poker players) decided to try online poker, so what to choose - where the most ppl play - pokerstars.

We created account and deposited 100$. We started playing MTT for 4$ (180 ppl) and after 2 days we had 350$ in the acc. So fun it was. After that the same story happend to us. We hold the better hand pre-flop all in (ex. JJ vs 78) we die. And this many many times.

We dropped at 20$, then some cash games with funny bad beats and 0. We said damn, we played wrong too many all-ins, system doesn't like us.

We deposited again 100$ and we started playing 5$ MTT (45 ppl) and cash games. For 2 days we were 250$, the strange thing was that we noticed many odds that happend more often then they should:
4 of kinds, backdoor straights, flop fullhouses and flushes

After the 3rd day we begin to drop again - lost 75$ on 0.05/0.10 only with strong hands only on river or runner-runner.

Then we tried to figure what was going on? Why the system abuses? It's so obvious - the more you play, the more rake they gain.

One other thing - have you noticed that after one has received a "bad beat" on a tourney or S&G and if the next hand he goes all-in it's default win for him no matter the cards of his opponents.

We have noticed that the guy with the more money is favored a lot by the system, when calling all-ins with crap hands vs strong hands from players with short stack. So we tried something...

I registered for a tourney 1$ with near 2500 ppl and started playing damn loose looosee aggressive. Blinds 30 I reraise x8 times with any hand, ANY HAND. I began to receive many flop straights and had killed AA, QQ with them, so after 30min I had eliminated 7 ppl an was 3rd in the toruney. I keep my play until the hour and I won every 3rd hand beleive me or not every 3rd hand was mine with 2 pair at least. After the break I was chip leader, after the second break too. Then I was near 50k chips when I played vs a guy with 20k. On the flop we raised-reraised and when he went all-in I called I was 88% favourite, on the turn 94% and the river saved him... hmm this was so strange, I was so sure I would win, strange, may be I would have stacked too much (2.5 above the 2nd in tourney). Then the next hand I had to test the theory about the bad beat - all-in next hand. I went all in with 57, 2 ppl called (1 with AQ and other AA). I get the BACKDOOR TRIPS - turn 7 river 7 WOW!

Other things that happen too much is the board cards - they are very very often all above 7 or under 7, I mean flop AQ9 or 453 is more often to come than QT3 or J46. Other thing is that so often happens the flop to be same color. This has to be 19:1 on PS it's 10~14:1.

Other thing - go play HEADS UP - damn funny thing. So often when I had advantage (more stack 4:1) I knew when I hold AQ or AK my opponent has avarage pair and because I have more money I always win (47/53) after preflop all-in.

All these stories happend strange to us and we began to seek some info on the net with words like "pokerstars abuse" or cheats or whatever then we found the word "rigged" (we didn't know it) and so we found this thread and after reading your comments I know, we aren't the only one who've seen this whole fucking abuse at pokerstars.

Just when you play there - look for the thing I wrote... You'll see it's not a luck.

Sry for my bad english, I hope you'll get what I try to explain.

To generalize my post: Pokerstars random number generator isn't RANDOM.
I bet my house on this, I'm a winning gambler, have this on mind.